New Watchdog Group Ranks Nations in 'Corruption Index'

By BARBARA CROSSETTE

Published: August 13, 1995

UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 10—
Everyone in global business, diplomacy or even charitable organizations is familiar with the problem of corruption. But in a world where one person's bribe is somebody else's commission, corruption can be as hard to prove as it is to combat.

Two years ago a group of people with experience in international agencies and business who saw the need for a worldwide lobby against corruption formed a research and advocacy body they called Transparency International. This year the group published its first Corruption Index, a poll of polls that takes a tentative step toward ranking the world's most corrupt and least corrupt countries.

Using seven surveys made by risk analysts and business organizations, Transparency International, based in Berlin, ranked 41 countries -- mostly in Asia, Europe and the Americas -- from least to most corrupt in the opinion of people who have tried to work with them.

Cleanest of all was New Zealand, one of only four countries to score above 9 on a scale from 1 to 10. Close behind were Denmark, Singapore and Finland. The United States, with a score of 7.79, trailed most northern European countries and Chile. But Americans did better than either the French or the Japanese.

At the bottom -- most corrupt -- end of the scale, with scores below 3, were Indonesia, China, Pakistan, Venezuela, Brazil, Philippines, India, Thailand and Italy.

The collation and analysis of the seven admittedly often impressionistic surveys was done for Transparency International by Johann Graf Lambsdorff of the University of Gottingen in Germany. Mr. Lambsdorff, an economist, said in a telephone interview from Germany that Transparency International was beginning its own survey this year and building its own data base.

This weekend the organization is opening an address on the Internet's World Wide Web to solicit personal experiences of corruption from people working for international organizations. (The address is http:// www.gwdg.de/ uwvw/icr.htm -- or Transparency International, Heytstrasse 33, D-10825 Berlin.)

Mr. Lambsdorff said that Transparency International was primarily looking for corruption in government and public life, but that methods of doing business, public or private, were closely related to social and cultural patterns of behavior. He wants to know about these also.

"There are so many different systems of corruption, or cultures of corruption, established in the world," Mr. Lambsdorff said. Sometimes corruption is not measured only in payoffs or kickbacks but also in the way personal, family or ethnic relationships are used. In many places, some of these behavior patterns are not considered unethical, even if a government tries to make them illegal.

The Far Eastern Economic Review, Asia's leading news and business magazine, explores some of these issues in its Aug. 10 issue. Polling 3,000 executives in Asia, it found that more than a third of business leaders in Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand said they would rather bribe a customer than lose a big sale. In Singapore, where anti-corruption laws are tough and effective, about a quarter of executives polled still said they would prefer a bribe to failure.

Despite cultural differences, Mr. Lambsdorff said, "if I compare all the surveys, it is quite striking that they are highly correlated, as high as 90 percent." He said that the surveys he used cannot be seen as statistical proof that one place is more corrupt than another, "but among people with experience there is a certain pattern of ranking."